After stripping out some sloppy staff phraseology, Arlington County Board members on Feb. 24 voted 5-0 to use a ranked-choice-voting method tabulating results in the November 2024 County Board general election, while declining at this point to make the change permanent.
“We’ll see how it goes,” County Board Chairman Libby Garvey said during consideration of the proposal, which switches the County Board election from the traditional winner-take-all format to ranked-choice voting specifically for the November 2024 election.
Under the ranked-choice process, Arlington voters will be able to rank their top three preferences in the County Board race, with candidates eliminated if they are at the bottom of the vote tally. Votes cast for those eliminated candidates would be reallocated as instructed by their voters in a process that would continue until one candidate received a total of 50 percent of the vote plus one extra vote.
(If there ends up being one or two candidates on the general-election ballot for County Board, the ranked-choice process will be unnecessary and the race will revert to a typical winner-take-all election.)
County Board members last December for a second year imposed the voting-method change on the Democratic County Board primary, which is held each June. After concerns were raised about the use of ranked-choice voting in the 2023 primary, County Board members opted against using ranked-choice voting for the November 2023 general election, but agreed to bring the matter up for consideration in 2024.
Given political inclinations of the Arlington electorate, the Democratic primary in recent decades largely has served as the point where final outcomes are decided, while in most cases the resulting County Board general-election campaign has marched toward an effectively pre-ordained conclusion. No non-Democrat has been elected to the County Board since 2014, and the last before that was in 1999.
County Board member Matt de Ferranti, while supporting a move to ranked-choice voting, said considering the 2024 election a pilot program is a case of “being careful and thorough” to “make sure we’ve got it right.” Garvey said that in case of any unforeseen issue cropping up, “we have some time to work it through.”
The lone general-election County Board race on the November 2024 ballot will be for the seat of Garvey, who is not seeking re-election after having held the post for a dozen years.
Stripped out of the ordinance before its Feb. 24 approval was original staff phrasing related to what would happen if the November 2024 general election ended up having two, rather than one, County Board seats on the ballot.
County staff member David Bacerra on Feb. 24 acknowledged to County Board members that there is no possible scenario in which there could be two County Board “general election” races in November 2024, as any vacancy that unexpectedly cropped up would be considered a special election and run under those rules.
That erroneous verbiage, whose inconsistency the GazetteLeader may have been first to point out to staff a week previously, was excised from the ordinance before it was presented to County Board members for adoption.
Virginia localities were granted authority to move from winner-take-all elections to ranked-choice (for governing bodies only) during the brief window when Democratic controlled both houses of the General Assembly and the governorship.
